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Getting database value to display it on JSP [duplicate]

We have a rather large application, with a great deal of dynamic content. Is there anyway to force struts to use a database for the i18n lookups, instead of properties files?
I'd be open for other ways to solve this as well, if anyone has ever done i18n with dynamic content.

I don't know of an easy plug-and-play solution for this, so you will probably have to implement it yourself -- plan on spending quite a bit of time just coming to grips with how the localization features of struts 2 (and XWork) are implemented. The key will probably be to provide your own implementation of com.opensymphony.xwork2.TextProvider (and tell struts to use it by providing a <bean> tag in struts.xml). I can think of at least two ways of fitting this into the overall architecture:
Have your TextProvider implementation access the database directly. In the spirit of YAGNI, this is probably the best way to start (you can always refactor later, if necessary).
Alternatively, you could place the database code into an implementation of Java's ResourceBundle interface, which is what XWork uses internally. To me this sounds like an even more design-heavy approach, but on the plus side there are some articles around describing how to do this.

No, there is no built-in way to have Struts2 load localized content from a database. You would need to write that yourself.
What are your requirements? Do you need for users to be able to dynamically change field prompts, error messages, etc.?

You may be able to do something like that by building a custom interceptor. You could have the interceptor read all the key value pairs from your database and inject them into the value stack. The only thing I am not sure about, not really having messed with i18n with struts before, is if the i18n stuff pulls that information from the value stack. If not, I am not sure if maybe you could do something else in the interceptor to load up the information.
Building a custom interceptor is not too terribly complicated. There are plenty of tutorial sites out there, including (brace for self promotion here) my blog: http://ddubbya.blogspot.com/2011/01/creating-custom-struts2-interceptors.html.

Use properties files just for static content, like labels, messages etc.
For dynamic content start with a database table that includes a language-code-id for every language you want to use. All the dynamic content entries that are already translated go with their respective language-code-id added to their primary key. If a translation is missing, you can program your application to fall back to your default language in order to make things easier until the right translation is present.
Let your users provide their contributions in the language they like and store it with the appropriate language-id. Someone should provide the translation to the other languages in order to make the contribution complete.
...
PRIMARY KEY (`subject_id`,`language_id`),
...

Best way of adding id's to html elements in GWT

I'm rather unexperienced in GWT, and I have large codebase with working project in this technology. My task refers to assigning id's to html elements witch will be used in automatic testing. We can't use some dynamically assigned id's because in automatic test we have to specify exact values of id's. My way for now was to use method ensureDebug(id), written by hand in code for specific elements.
I think that doing it this way mean that code will be more spaghetti-like, with mixed ensureDebug(id) methods usages there and here. I was thinking if there is any way of doing it that will be more manageable and cleaner than current. Is is maybe possible to use AOP? (I have never used AOP, so I don't know if it is any good idea, or possible in GWT) Or maybe other way than using ensureDebug?

You also can set the IDs for HTML elements like
element.setId("myId");
But this is as much spaghetti like as your approach adding the IDs in the code.
Another possibility would be to use an UiBinder and set the id there. With this approach you have all your ui elements of one view, which should have an id, at one place. With bootstrap for example it would look like this:
<b:TextBox ui:field="searchTextBox" b:id="search-text-box"/>
Like this you can access the field in your view-class via searchTextBox and the id search-text-boxis added to the HTML element (which you could also use for styling etc.)

We have faced same issue for our project while adding test automation. As per my knowledge unfortunately GWT doesn't support anything like AOP yet. So we have to follow any of the spaghetti-like approach only from one mentioned above by #mxlse or the one you are already following.
Based on my experience I can recommend you to create separate constant/property at client or server end. Use this file to save all your id's which you can share latter on with test team as well.

JSP internationalization RTL/LTR

I want to create a web site which can be viewed with two languages, one LTR and one RTL. This means that all content should be shown in either of the two languages.
My framework is Spring, and I'm using Tiles2, but I think this question is not framework specific.
The obvious solution to supporting two languages is having everything doubled (all JSP's, fragments, etc.), and you get the part of the tree which fits the language you chose. But this causes problems when changing the web site (you might forget to update the other JSP's), and is not scalable (try doing this for 5 or 10 languages).
I know I can use properties files to host strings for the different languages, but then my web site would be a huge collection of spring:message tags and will be a lot harder to maintain (what happens if I have a paragraph of 100 lines, does this all go into a single properties line?)
Is there any kind of framework, plugin, other, which solves this problem? Has anyone come across a clever solution to this problem?

I've never realized a complete project, just some tests. I think this problem is not so big as it seems if you follow some simple rules. Here is what I would try to do:
Specify direction with <body dir='ltr/rtl'>. This is preferred versus CSS direction attribute.
Avoid different left/right margins or paddings in all CSS. If you must break this rule, probably you'll need to use two different files (ltr.css and rtl.css) containing all these different elements.
Sometimes you'll need to move some elements from left to right or vice versa. For example, in LTR you want a menu on the left, but in RTL you want it on the right. You can achieve this using CSS, but this sometimes is complicated if you are not an expert and you must test it in all browsers. Another option is to use some IF depending on the case. This last option will fit very well if you use a grid based CSS library, like Bootstrap.
Choose carefully which CSS and JS libraries you'll use. Obviously, pick the ones which offer RTL/LTR support.
Don't worry too much about the images. If you must change one image depending on the language is probably because it has some text in it. So, you must use different images anyway. This is a problem related to i18n, not a text direction issue.
Don't let your customer to be too much fussy about it. I think that with these rules (and maybe some more) you can get a good result. But if your customer starts complaining about one pixel here and another one there, you'll need to complicate all this and probably is not necessary.
About your language properties file. Yes, use them. Always. This is a good practice even when you are only using one language: HTML structure is separated from content, is very easy to correct or translate, some words or sentences are in only one file...

Usually, web frameworks are used to build web applications rather than web sites, and there are quite few long static paragraphs. Most of the content is dynamic and comes from a database. But yes, the usual way of doing is to externalize everything to resource bundles, usually in the form of properties files.
Putting a long paragraph in a properties file doesn't cause much problem, because you can break long paragraphs into multiple lines by ending each line by a backslash:
home.welcomeParagraph=This is a long \
paragraph splitted into several lines \
thanks to backslashes.

RTL and LTR is one of the upper and more difficult i18n problems.
Basically its a Problem of the view-scope of the MVC-Model. This may also includes pictures and emotional differences like the color of the skin of people. In this case you better abadon to the solution HTML+CSS gives you.
In example:
<style type="text/css">
*:lang(ar) { direction:rtl }
*:lang(de) { direction:ltr }
</style>
The best practice is to ask members of the audience-group about what effect the webpages have to them.

I agree to most of solutions provided here. Your problem is more design (architecturally) oriented rather than technical. You need to choose path whether you need to keep this logic of internationalization on server (java) side or in static files.
In case you want to go for java side (preferable solution), you need to keep two properties file and use jstl tags. This minimizes your work in case you want to add another language in future. This is maintainable solution. I have seen applications supporting more than 15 languages and time zones. In fact release process gets pretty easy.
In case you want to go for keeping multiple css and other static files, you will soon find things running out of your hands pretty soon. I dont think this is a maintainable solution.
Said all this, I will leave this choice to the architect of application. He will be able to judge which way to go based upon the nature of application and constraints given to him.

You don't want to use everywhere. That's a pity because it is just the way you should do it. It is a bad practice to keep hard-coded texts in a jsp if you need internationalization.
Furthermore, Most of the modern IDE allows you to go to the variable declaration by doing ctrl+left click (or hovering the key) so that having a lot of variables in your code should not be a problem for maintenance.

First, you must distinguish, for each text element, whether it is a user interface element (e.g. button label) or redactionnal content.
user interface element labels will be stored in properties file that will have to be translated for each supported language (and provide a default value as a fall back)
redactionnal content will be stored in a content management system that you will organize in order to find easily a localized version of your content

Refactor hardcoded variable across multiple classes into one global variable?

(First time please be gentle etc. etc.)
Let's say I was lazy/unthinking/pressed for time and hardcoded a string instead of making a global variable. And I repeated this mistake over hundreds of classes and test cases that I wrote. Now, I want to fix this, since I found out I'll eventually need to update that string. Is there some refactoring method in Eclipse or elsewhere that will let me replace all instances of that specific string with a global variable?
I can think of a programmatic solution, to run through all those files and replace the string, but I'd prefer not to go down that route unless absolutely necessary.
Thanks a lot!

Well you can use search and replace within Eclipse across all the files in your project, for one thing. You don't need to write that yourself.
It doesn't look like the "Extract Constant" refactoring of Eclipse is willing to extract it across classes, unfortunately. That would obviously be the nicer solution.

Eclipse provide Refactor option.
right click on value which you want to replace with variable, you will see option Refactor.
this will help you replace value from all other occurance.

You can find referenced place to an element in eclipse as following:
Selected element.(variable of String in your case)
Sight click on selected element
Selected menu References
Select Workspace item for finding all references in your workspace
Then you can edit evry item in result
Exist another way such as using search and replace feature.

Eclipse: Fulltext autocompletion for Java?

can I has fulltext autocompletion for Java # Eclipse? Let's demonstrate:
Final piece of code:
getVariants().add(new Variant(MediaType.TEXT_XML));
How do I code now:
getv[ctrl+space].a[Enter]new
V[ctrl+space, down arrow,
Enter]M[Ctrl+Space, Enter].text_x
Basically, Eclipse completes word "TEXT_XML" when I provide letters "TEXT_X".
How would I like to code:
getv[ctrl+space].a[Enter]new
V[ctrl+space, down arrow,
Enter]M[Ctrl+Space, Enter].xml
and Eclipse should realise I meant "TEXT_XML" (fulltext autocompletion).

As far as I'm aware, there is no way of enabling a full-text code completion in the Eclipse preferences view. This has been bugging me for a while, too. I did quite a bit of digging and I'm pretty certain there is no easy way of achieving this.
However,
there are two ways of implementing the desired, but I assume both of which are way to much work for fixing this little nuisance.
There is an Eclipse plug-in extension point for the JDT Java Completion Proposal Computer - reference page
A sample project which implements this extension point can be found in this repository.
This is fairly convenient, but still a lot of boilerplate and tedious coding.
You can change the findKeywords method in the internal org.eclipse.jdt.internal.codeassist.CompletionEngine class and compile your own JDT fork. But this is discouraged for so many reasons. First of all, this class is a 12000 line monster and hard to just jump in. And of course, if you'd only hack a kludge in, there is little chance of this becoming an official contribution, so you'd need to worry about every eclipse release.
Additionally, there might be a very chillaxed way in the future. Although this might exceed your requirements a bit.
Have a look at the Code Recommenders project. This blog has an outline of the project objectives
It doesn't mention full-text auto-completion specifically, but I'd assume its matching algorithms go even beyond that.
Edit: In the proper SO-spirit, I'll keep this answer up to date:
Apparently the feature is now implemented in the Code Recommenders plug-in. See this blog post and this forum thread. I'm quite surprised it only took 10 locs. To me the extension point appeared more complex.

If your MediaType class does not contain a large number of accessible fields/methods you could simply use
getv[ctrl+space].a[Enter]new V[ctrl+space, down arrow, Enter]M[Ctrl+Space, Enter].[Ctrl+Space, down arrow, Enter]
you may need to press the down arrow more than once, though to select the desired field.

Yes, you can using Templates. (Window -> Preferences -> Java -> Editor -> Templates)
The basic usage is you set the name to what you want to type and you set the pattern to what you want to appear.
In my testing I set the name to xml, the Context to Java, the Pattern to TEXT_XML and Automatically insert turned on. Then when I typed out your example I was able to follow a pattern like...
getv[ctrl+space].a[enter]new V[ctrl+space, down arrow, Enter]M[ctrl+Space, Enter].xml[ctrl+space]
and since Automatically insert was turned on poof TEXT_XML was inserted.
Templates have much more functionality than that and the one source I used for this answer was Effective Eclipse.
I hope this helps!